Social Psychology Knowledge Organizer

Here’s a knowledge organizer I’ve created of the most essential terms for social psychology in an introductory psychology course. These knowledge organizers are designed to help you identify the most important factual knowledge you need to have in order to … Read More

Personality Knowledge Organizer

Here’s a knowledge organizer I’ve created of the most essential terms for personality in an introductory psychology course. These knowledge organizers are designed to help you identify the most important factual knowledge you need to have in order to engage … Read More

Psychology in 22 Minutes

In this video I provide a comprehensive overview of the many subfields of psychology and how these fit together to provide a deeper understanding of the complexity of human thought and behavior. These include units on history and early approaches, … Read More

General Adaptation Syndrome

In this video I describe homeostasis, which refers to maintenance of an optimal state, and allostasis, which clarifies that an optimal state is actually a range of possible states depending on context. Next I discuss Hans Selye’s theory of General … Read More

What is an Emotion?

In this video I introduce the concept of multidimensional scaling to investigate emotions more objectively. This approach involves considering emotional experiences on two dimensions; valence and level of physiological arousal. Valence refers to how strongly an emotion is experienced as … Read More

What Causes Trait Differences?

In this video we consider why traits might differ between people, beginning with the possible role of biological systems. Hans Eysenck suggested that introverts and extraverts differed in their levels of cortical arousal, resulting in different needs for stimulation that … Read More

The Five Factor Model or “Big Five”

In this video I briefly describe the Five Factor Model or Big Five, which considers five main dimensions of personality: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. This model comes from the work of Robert McCrae and Paul Costa, … Read More

Which Personality Traits Matter?

In this video I describe several approaches to narrowing down personality traits into a manageable number of ways of thinking about how people differ. These include Gordon Allport‘s hierarchy of cardinal dispositions, central traits, and secondary traits, the use of … Read More

Psychodynamic Theorists: Adler, Horney, Jung

In this video I briefly describe some critiques and concepts introduced by the Psychodynamic theorists or Neo-Freudians. Alfred Adler disagreed with Freud’s emphasis on sexual and aggressive drives and proposed social tensions as important in the development of an inferiority … Read More

The Somatic Marker Hypothesis

Do we need emotions to make decisions? In this video I describe Antonio Damasio’s Somatic Marker Hypothesis and then discuss research using Antoine Bechara’s Iowa Gambling Task to assess how emotional reactivity guides decision-making in healthy controls and patients with … Read More